Recent posts

#71
Terragen Discussion / Re: New external drive Tg4 can...
Last post by james adamson - March 13, 2024, 11:15:05 AM
Is the RPC module already installed in 4.7?
#72
Terragen Discussion / Re: New external drive Tg4 can...
Last post by james adamson - March 13, 2024, 10:50:51 AM
Thanks all.
Appreciate the help jumping back on it now.
#73
Image Sharing / Re: Mudflats
Last post by Dune - March 13, 2024, 03:00:55 AM
Here's another setup with 2 settings for reflective mud. One at 0.2, the other at 0.5, both non-RT, roughness 0.1 or 0.2, can't remember exactly. The 'water' is just a 100% reflective shader, roughness 0.01, with some additional colors to mimic debris (with a bit of warp by normal: 0.5 or 1, so the darks and light stick to one side, more or less). Water area smoothed (smoothing ripples) and broken up by a PF as well, not only colors, so you get this rough, eroded edge.
And your bike wake ;D
#74
Image Sharing / Re: The Rough-Hewn Shore
Last post by Dune - March 13, 2024, 02:53:24 AM
Either would work, I'd say. I sometimes make the base color just W 0.2 and B 0.2 grey, so it's an even coverage.
#75
Announcements / Re: Terragen 4.7.08.frontier
Last post by rolland1013 - March 12, 2024, 05:17:04 PM
I'm very excited about the new multi-channel EXR capabilities. But how do I get it to work, and what are the limitations? Like, I have a scene with several types of foliage: trees, bushes, grass, etc., and I need to create an alpha for each. The method I've been using is to render out a separate pass for each of the elements. Can all these passes be embedded now? I've tried a simple test with a render layer node assigned (visible foliage, holdout for the rest). But it didn't seem to work. Also, I didn't see any documentation on this new function.

Niel
#76
Image Sharing / Re: The Rough-Hewn Shore
Last post by schmeerlap - March 12, 2024, 01:08:10 PM
Quote from: Tangled-Universe on March 12, 2024, 11:44:07 AMfirst design your displacements and only have a grey lambert shader as surface shader.
So you're only using the Lambert shader in this instance to check how your displacements are reflecting light, and then disabling it before a final render, thus enabling all other colours in surface shaders / power fractals / image maps to take effect. Or, are you using Lambert shaders for colouring throughout the scene instead of colouring with power fractals and image maps.
#77
Image Sharing / Re: Mudflats
Last post by Dune - March 12, 2024, 11:51:16 AM
Yes, that's what I mean. I hardly ever change the tint. With RT checked you get a real reflective surface (slower to compute), with RT unchecked it's a haze, sort of, but still looks okay for wet mud, because of the highlights and such. Unless you use Path tracing, then it's treated as real reflection, so slower again.
#78
Image Sharing / Re: The Rough-Hewn Shore
Last post by Tangled-Universe - March 12, 2024, 11:44:07 AM
Another advice I can give is to first design your displacements and only have a grey lambert shader as surface shader.
This renders fast and gives you a good idea of how the light interacts with your surfaces and it also allows you te explore which detail level you need.
Do some small crop renders with AA8 and detail 0.4, 0.5 and 0.6...at some point you'll find there's no added quality anymore, so the setting before that becomes the detail setting.
The reason I'm pushing for AA8 during testing is that you would not like to mistake AA noise for actual surface detail in a similar fashion to how film grain also perceptually adds sharpness while it technically isn't.
If I were to choose between too low surface detail vs too low AA I'd go for surface detail, because shaders still look better with high AA and also vegetation, clouds and shadows.

Another workflow tip is to have your displacement shaders as child layers to distribution shaders or surface layers, so that the 'main chain' of your network is a chain of distribution/surface shaders.
The benefit of this is that you can enable colour output in all your displacement shaders and treat them all separately for masking and driving colour perfectly aligned for that particular displacement shader.
This gives far more coherent texturing results than creating rocks with PF's and then applying a completely different noise pattern over it. If you have your displacements in the main chain of your network you can still derive colour, but you for every 'level' in your network you would first have to subtract all preceding nodes first to extract the colour/noise for that particular node. Therefore it's much easier to 'side chain' it all using distribution/surface shaders and work from there in an independent manner.
#79
Image Sharing / Re: Mudflats
Last post by schmeerlap - March 12, 2024, 10:29:50 AM
Please confirm for my thick head that you refer to Ray traced reflections when using the abbreviation RT, and not Reflection tint.  :-[
#80
Image Sharing / Re: Mudflats
Last post by Dune - March 12, 2024, 10:14:03 AM
Thanks for your somments, guys. The ripples are 2 imagemaps, and I'm still trying to do something procedurally. I agree about the roughish part in the center. I am also not satisfied with the whitish color. It could be watered/smudged bird droppings, but it's not recognizable as 'something'. The only floating foam is in the water. The 'clams' are just fake stones with a hard color variation, but I like the effect too. The wet areas are also a bit bumpy (watered down sand ridges), and for real water remnants they have to go.
The stream is just a simple shape, but something like this will have to be built from a wider area with actual creeks.
For wettish mud I usually use non-RT reflection with a reflectiveness of something like 0.2-0.5 and roughness 0.2, highlight intensity also down to 0.5, but it depends on how wet your mud needs to be. For the watery bits, full reflectivity and roughness 0.01 or so. I didn't use RT, but added some localized (Simple shapes) RT reflective areas where it's really beneficial (for a reflected plant or bird or so). All to keep render times low ;)